ERP Background and Context

Introduction

Partnerships are essential to implementing the California Child Welfare Core Practice Model (CPM) and achieving positive outcomes for children and families. The CPM promotes behaviors and values foundational to collaboration – at both practice and system levels. This serves to keep children safe and meet the needs of families, heal the trauma experienced from system involvement and build more comprehensive, culturally humble service partnerships with community.

Partnerships with families, communities and Tribes are key to identifying and addressing system barriers and creating comprehensive culturally responsive practices, supports and services for the children and families being served. Through the building of strong partnerships, grounded in the principles of CPM, the work of keeping young people safe, living with permanent families, supported by connections, and attending to their trauma and well-being needs becomes a shared responsibility of the entire community, not just the child welfare worker and system.

Building and sustaining strong partnerships can only be meaningfully achieved when Child Welfare Services (CWS) staff partner through a lens of cultural humility. Central to this framework are the ability to acknowledge gaps in one's knowledge of others, an openness to new ideas, and a willingness to accept that individuals and families are the experts in their own experiences and views of the world in which we all live.

Goals for the Toolkit

The ERP Toolkit is designed to accomplish the following goals:

  • Reinforce the value that child welfare, the community and partner agencies share responsibility with families to make collaborative decisions supporting the safety, permanency and well-being of children and youth
  • Provide foundational materials such as tools, templates, resources and examples to assist child welfare agencies and their community, Tribal and system partners to work together on practice and system changes related to CPM
  • Offer insight and information on the essential role and contributions that community partners can play in improving child welfare practice, systems and outcomes
  • Help child welfare leaders and staff reach out and engage those community members or organizations who may not have been traditionally recognized or meaningfully involved as partners in the past

Given that engagement, relationships and partnership are dynamic developmental processes impacted by the people, systems and contexts involved, the application of these tools and resources may look different in each county jurisdiction. True system transformation within the CPM framework requires a commitment of each county's leadership team to travel down this path in collaboration with their partners and communities.

Why Partnership is Critical for Quality Implementation of CPM

A fundamental value of CPM is that children, youth and young adults are more likely to achieve lasting safety, permanency and well-being in the context of family, culture and community. In addition, the CPM practice elements of assessment, teaming, advocacy and accountability all depend on meaningful, active engagement of community, Tribal and system partners working together with child welfare agencies on behalf of children and families. Each of these aspirations requires a solid foundation of partnership. Roles partners play in quality implementation of CPM include:

  • Work collaboratively across agencies and communities to address system barriers
  • Jointly establish the pathways to culturally relevant supports and services
  • Contribute to building competency throughout the system
  • Engage in regular, ongoing communication and feedback loops to fortify continuous quality improvement
  • Join across systems and communities to create a seamless continuum of care, services and supports
  • Help ensure cross-system accountability for keeping children safe, families strong and systems responsive
  • Contribute to a mutual understanding around common issues while co-creating solutions as the system aims for improved outcomes for children and their families

CPM Leadership Behaviors for Promoting Partnerships

The following table highlights the CPM Leadership Behaviors most relevant to promoting quality CPM implementation through Engagement, Relationships and Partnership. Each Behavior supports one or more of the five sections of partnership development which are described in more detail in the remainder of this document. What's important here are the places where CPM Leadership Behaviors intersect with the work of cultivating, maintaining and sustaining partnerships. These intersections mark important leadership behaviors to apply throughout CPM Implementation.